Have you ever been responsible for any noteworthy failures in your business career? No, me neither, but apparently it happens.
Well OK, there was that one time, but nobody found out – oh and that other time, but nobody realised it was me – and that other time when it all went dreadfully wrong but we seemed to have got away with it.
Well don’t worry; your secrets are safe with me. But apparently, and I guess this is something we all know deep down, failures and mistakes are valuable intellectual property – so we need to recognise them, admit to them and learn from them.
Not only that, but a report from the University of Plymouth Business school published in the Journal of Safety Science, says that the very fact of having experienced failure makes us more capable.
According to Professor Ashraf Labib and Dr Martin Read, some of the world’s greatest disasters could have been avoided if those behind them had experienced more failure. Avoiding over-confidence is among a list of ten helpful ‘tools’ the academics developed based on the outcome of case studies of high-profile disasters designed to help organisations and managers understand reasons for disasters.
The two academics say that the sinking of the Titanic, the loss of the space shuttles Columbia and Challenger, two BP oil refinery explosions with huge loss of life, and the international recall of more than eight million cars by Toyota all have in common an inflated degree of confidence. Maybe we could add the banking crisis to that list.
Apparently organisations learn more effectively from failures than from successes, but organisations vary at learning from them. They also say that organisations can learn from the failures and near-failures of other organisations.
Professor Labib said: “A lack of failure can lead to over-confidence and ‘blindness’ to the possibility of problems.
“Some managers and organisations see their role as akin to re-arranging the deckchairs on the Titanic, but disasters, when you study them, are often built on futile exercises that don’t help avoid problems.
“Failures in general and disasters in particular can stimulate a blame culture that can act as a barrier to learning from mistakes, but it is important to note human beings are naturally programmed to learn, whereas organisations are not.”
So there you have it; embrace your inner loser.
And if it all goes wrong, don’t blame me.
Andy Sandford
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